Sanity is a content platform where the editing interface is a React app you configure yourself in TypeScript. Content lives in a hosted dataset queried with GROQ or GraphQL. The free tier includes 3 users and 10GB of assets; Growth starts at $15 per seat per month.
What is Sanity?
Founded in 2015 in Oslo, Sanity calls its product the Content Operating System and ships three parts: a content lake (the database), the Studio (an editor you build), and APIs. Because the Studio is a normal React codebase, you can put any field, validation or preview inside it — a color picker, a product selector pulling from Stripe, a live preview of the actual site.
Compare that with Contentful, which gives you a fixed editor and a rigid field list. Sanity trades setup work for fit.
Product Features
- Custom Studio built with React and the `sanity` package, deployable to Sanity’s host or Vercel.
- GROQ query language plus a GraphQL endpoint for reading and projecting content.
- Real-time collaboration on documents with presence indicators and version history back 30 days on paid plans.
- Presentation tool for side-by-side editing with a live front-end preview via iframe.
- Asset pipeline with automatic image transforms (crop, hotspot, format) served through a CDN.
- Webhooks and Functions triggered on document changes, useful for revalidation or syncing to a search index.
Product Highlights
- The Studio is real code, which means schema changes go through review and deploys. Marketers who expect a point-and-click field editor will be disappointed.
- Sanity does not render pages. You still need Next.js, Nuxt or Astro — budget front-end time, not just CMS time.
- Free tier is genuinely usable for a small team: 3 users, 10GB assets, 100K API requests per month.
- GROQ has a learning curve. Developers who know GraphQL often wish they could use only that.
Who is Sanity for?
Product and marketing teams with in-house React developers and content that needs structured, reusable pieces — a component library of hero blocks, pricing tiers, testimonials — rather than articles.
Not for a blog run by one marketer. WordPress or Ghost will ship faster and cost less. And not for teams without JavaScript skills; the Studio is not configurable from a settings panel.
Pricing in 2026
Free: 3 users, 10GB assets, 100K API requests per month, 2 datasets, no version history beyond a short window. Growth: $15 per seat per month with 5 datasets and 30-day history. Enterprise: custom pricing with SSO, audit logs and a dedicated CDN. Extra API requests beyond the allowance are billed per million.
Use Cases
- Building a marketing site where editors assemble pages from approved blocks instead of pasting HTML.
- Managing product data that feeds a Next.js storefront and a mobile app from one dataset.
- Giving translators a custom Studio view that shows source and target fields side by side.
- Powering documentation with structured version metadata rather than a flat folder tree.
- Syncing published content to Algolia on every change through a webhook.
Quick Summary
- Sanity is a structured content platform whose editing UI is a React Studio you configure in code.
- The free tier covers 3 users and 10GB of assets; Growth costs $15 per seat per month.
- Content is queried via GROQ or GraphQL, and rendering is entirely your front-end’s responsibility.
- Best for teams with React developers and component-based content; a poor fit for single-author blogs.